Twilight in Perfidy
by auntarctica
Summary: There came a moment, once you had walked the sands for days uncounted, treacherous dunes giving way beneath your boots, when the endless loop was broken. The interminable pattern would shift, and the earth ceased to slide away from you. WolfwoodxVash
1. Chapter 1

_This story is for Tiggy Malvern, with love. Despite the fact that she's my Trigun beta, and has read it from every possible depraved angle, I couldn't possibly dedicate it to anyone else. Thanks for everything. _

_Nico_

CHAPTER 1

Twilight, at the edge of the town called Perfidy.

Twilight, and the sky was the same.

It mirrored the skies of countless evenings before this one, conforming coolly to type, a halcyon cornflower blue inset with innumerable stars.

Yes, stars.

He paused, as always, to look.

On the periphery, he found himself lingering, playing for time.

Feeling the old mild dread rise up, somewhere in a deep and unformed place; the uneasy thought of walking into a strange town, reluctant to make contact with anything in it, for fear that it might hold some kind of inverted Midas touch.

It had been better, once, walking alone-- or walking ahead, trailing others in your wake-- before he had suddenly found himself walking _beside_. All at once, and all too swiftly, it had ruined him.

Vash refused to look behind him.

The wind had picked up, and picked up sand. He felt it blowing over his back, hostile, insistent, as the mercenary grains struck his face in a stinging chorus. It spun the tatty edges of his crimson coat out behind him like blood-red banners.

It was buffeting, chaotic, directionless. It had no origin, no objective, no destination.

Vash kept his eyes on the horizon.

The town was imminently near. There were no signs, as of yet, but he knew. He knew he had reached Perfidy by the feel of the ground.

There came a moment, once you had walked the sands for days uncounted, treacherous dunes giving way beneath your boots, when the endless loop was broken. The interminable pattern would shift, and the earth ceased to slide away from you.

Sometimes it happened abruptly, and sometimes it came about gradually, over hours. Your steps grew less laborious, less arduous, and faster- and you knew then that you were near town, because towns were never built on ephemera, not on flawed, faulted, shifting sand, they were built on that rarest of all oases-

"Terra firma," declared someone, nearly voicing his thoughts, and Vash looked up in surprise.

"Wolfwood," he exclaimed. "I didn't expect--

"Of course not," the priest agreed. "Neither did I."

He shook his head, smiling, shrugging.

"But- here we are, eh?"

Here indeed.

Here then, was the weather-beaten sign announcing that he had entered the outskirts of Perfidy- population 99- haphazardly nailed to a skewed post in the sand.

And here was Wolfwood, the sharp and fluid lines of his black suit carving his figure out of the surrounding element, the white slash of his wide and open collar setting off the tanned expanse of his neck and chest.

He stood as if he hung there, an elegant marionette, suspended in the very nitrogen and oxygen of the air.

The priest produced a cigarette from somewhere, from the minimal recesses of that black jacket, and Vash never wondered at their provision, or proliferance. Surely a man of the divine cloth would have such boundless resources- bottomless pockets full of slim white sticks to ignite and immolate in the name of small comforts.

He struck a match, cupping his long fingers around the flame protectively. The wind drew up fiercely around him, offended by his presumption, hell-bent on thwarting his efforts.

But no.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood would have his cigarette.

He drew inward, and the ashes set to glowing, a neon-red rose folding inward on itself, alight, alive.

His smile was diminutive, vaguely triumphant, and Vash smiled too.

"It's the small victories," he remarked.

Vash nodded, understanding perfectly.

Beyond Wolfwood, a small sand devil swirled lazily in the periphery, a microcosmic model of the onslaught to come.

The priest exhaled, looking at him expectantly.

The silence fell, repressed and withdrew, all in a short moment. Vash felt caught out, zeroed in. He marveled at the awkwardness of it all, even as it left him functionally mute, unsure of what to say.

"How'd you beat me?" he asked, brightly abrupt, scratching the back of his head.

Wolfwood shook out the match, deliberately, even though it had long since been extinguished by the wind.

"Don't try to bluff me. You can't. Remember?"

"I'm sorry," Vash broke in, wide-eyed, contrite. "I'm glad to see you- I really am."

Wolfwood had apparently decided to ignore the whole exchange, committing it to oblivion with a shrug of his well-hung shoulders. The suns were descending behind him, and the sky was emblazoned with violent streaks of color as the day met its demise.

He glanced around, taking a leisurely survey of the horizon.

"Still mad?" he asked, casually, taking a drag.

Vash blinked.

"About this morning?"

The priest nodded slowly.

"No," Vash said, deliberately. "No. I'm done being angry."

Wolfwood broke a grin.

"You don't say? That's great news," he exclaimed, surging into motion, clapping Vash on the stiff red leather of his shoulder, and tossing his cigarette, half-finished, into the sand. "I was going to take a room above the saloon. Want to bunk up?"

Vash felt a smile descending, just touching his lips, and the onset of welcome relief that came with it.

How quickly Wolfwood could disarm him.

"I could use a drink," he said, by way of acceptance.

"Couldn't we all," agreed the priest, shouldering his omnipresent luggage.

"Need a hand with that, Preacher-man?" Vash asked, amused. "I travel light."

Wolfwood shook his head good-naturedly.

"You travel light, Tongari, so I carry enough mercy for both of us."

Vash shrugged cheerfully.

"Suit yourself."

He knew well what mercy lay beneath the muslin trappings of the priest's strange burden, lashed down with leather straps and buckles. It had awed Vash, the first time, when he'd deftly unbound his weapon, the canvas falling away in a lost flutter of white, revealing unforgiving metal.

Score one for the arm of the Lord.


	2. Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

As they walked, Vash studied the long twin shadows that stretched before them, both rather fantastic in nature, augmented by the inorganic shapes of hair and cross, respectively.

"Gonna be a sandstorm tonight," remarked Wolfwood, narrowing his eyes and gazing out at the darkening silhouettes of the dunes. The sky above them looked like a locust plague.

The town was dusty and still as any town at the onset of dusk, a study in various shades of sepia. Now encroaching night was plunging it into muted blue, casting everything in obscurity, like a veil draped over a lamp. It seemed softened, subdued.

As they approached the saloon, Wolfwood lit another cigarette.

"Your teeth are chattering," he observed.

Vash smiled wanly.

"I'm not very resistant-- to temperature."

Wolfwood didn't ask him to elaborate.

"Let's not linger in the bar, then," the priest said, pausing at the doors. "Bound to be chilly down here."

"There's whiskey down here," Vash pointed out.

"I'll get a key _and _a bottle," Wolfwood countered diplomatically, and disappeared through the swinging doors, which continued their phantom motion for several seconds after he'd gone.

Left alone, Vash leaned against the roughness of the wall, trying to ignore the rapidly falling mercury.

He turned his hands over and stared at his gritty palms. He plucked at the sleeves of his coat, crimson dulled by a layer of powder-fine sand. Everything, all of him, was covered in a dusty mist- every crease in the leather, every crevice of his ankle-length coat. Every part of him uncovered by leather was the same- he could feel it on his neck, coating his face and settled between the upthrust pronts and peaks of his hair.

It wouldn't show so much, he thought. Not against his blondness.

Not like it did on Nicholas. Wolfwood had such dark hair, something beyond plain crow and closer to honest jet, the extent of its blackness only truly evident in the blue luster it gained in certain lights.

It was a compellingly unnatural color that suited him well.

Wolfwood ducked back through the double doors, grinning, disrupting his thoughts, a bottle of deep amber in his grip. He pulled back his hand and tossed Vash the key.

"All squared away, Tongari. Whaddya say?"

"Thanks," managed Vash, through unresponsive lips.

"Don't mention it," the priest said, tucking his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and throwing a companionable arm around him.

They ascended the stairs, and Vash studied his friend's profile in the scant light. Wolfwood had a strong face, an unusual face, and yet it was a face he found hard to hold exactly right in his mind's eye when they were apart.

He assessed the details- his brow, the slightly roman outward curve of his nose, the unexpected fineness of his jaw.

Each piece, taken by itself, was handsome, almost classical. Altogether he was oddly refined in looks and structure, Vash realized, something at an entirely interesting juxtaposition with his rougher attributes.

Wolfwood relieved him of the keys and unlocked the door, easing it past the ramshackle jamb with an expertly measured bump of his shoulder.

"Applied brutality in moderation," remarked Vash, yawning.

Wolfwood's smile flashed in the semi-dark.

"All things in moderation, eh Tongari? That's our modus operandi, you and I."

The room, with its rustic iron double bed, was serviceable; spare but spotless. It was fairly generously sized, however, accommodating a table and two chairs by the window, beaten but sturdy in their construction.

Vash filled the washbasin with water from the cracked white pitcher on the table.

Sighing, he slowly began to rinse his face, plunging his hair beneath the surface and agitating the long pale spikes into a tangled mass.

Wolfwood had relinquished the Cross Punisher, settling it in the far corner of the room, a dormant sentinel quietly looming out of mind.

He fell backwards onto the bed, eliciting a bantam whicker of protest from the weary iron, and now he lay in repose, his long legs sprawled across the faded matelasse coverlet, quietly blowing rings of smoke toward the weathered planks and plaster of the ceiling.

Vash turned around, taking the threadbare hand towel from its tacking nail beside the basin. He bent his head and began to coax the moisture from his hair, dragging the rough cloth over its length.

It was, of course, beyond predictable.

As soon as he began to dry it, his hair embarked on its inevitable ascent, struggling toward uprightness with a force not unlike the indomitable insistence of natural curl, or the unstoppable progress of evolution.

Wolfwood was regarding him from the bed. He was conscious of that grey-dark gaze, its intensity, even at rest.

Vash paused.

"You're over it, aren't you?"

Wolfwood laughed quietly.

"I was over it before you cleared the first dune. Truth be told, Tongari, I never stay mad. Can't afford to."

A pause. "I have enough to carry."

"You seemed pretty angry."

"Flash fury." He shrugged, idly flicking ashes. "Don't last."

Vash glanced up, straggling pieces of obstinate hair falling over his face like the wayward points of a star. All over his head they seemed drawn back to cohesion, to formation. Separating into sections, they draped at half-mast in long graceful arcs, rapidly stiffening in the dry air, drawing up into thick, soft spikes.

"That's one hell of a cow-lick," said Wolfwood.

A ring of smoke outgrew its bounds and broke apart above their heads.

Vash smiled.

"Can't help it," he said.

Reaching inside his coat, he pulled his revolver from its holster, broke it, and laid it on the rickety bedside table.

"Are you still cold?" asked the priest meditatively, studying the patterns of smoke in the lamplight.

"Not so much," replied the gunman. "Heat rises, I guess."

He turned absent attention toward the .45, giving each of the pieces a quick pass with an oil soaked rag, a practiced gesture- minimal, efficacious.

Clouds of vicious sand had begun to roil outside, striking the window in a pinprick war of microcosmic proportions and epic effect. There was no visibility beyond the besieged glass. Even the darkness was imperceptible.

"What now?" asked Vash.

Wolfwood reached down over the edge of the bed and brandished the bottle of whiskey for his benefit.

Vash grinned, pulling a deck of cards from his pocket.

"Twenty-one?"

Wolfwood nodded, motioning for Vash to join him.

He sat up and reached into his jacket, letting a handful of bullets clatter and muffle against the plainness of the bedspread.

Vash took the clips from his guns and emptied them onto the mattress before sitting down, his back against the iron rails of the footboard.

They played for bullets, and not double-dollars, because money was a bad business among friends, according to Wolfwood-- who spoke as if he knew-

_Still_-

Sagacity aside, the inferences of the statement were not lost on Vash.

The priest clamped down on his cigarette, shuffling the deck and setting it down on the bed in front of Vash, handing him the bottle.

Vash cut, and drank, watching as Wolfwood shuffled again.

"Want to deal?" he asked.

Vash shook his head.

"It's all yours, friend."

It was an odd armistice that settled over them, calm and reclined, Wolfwood smoking without any particular urgency, Vash slumped across from him with a slight smile as he waited for the next turn of his hand.

The old tin lantern cast a sulky ring of tangerine-blue outward from the table, fading ever to black toward the sloping corners of the room, shunning acquaintance with all things that lay outside the circle of its influence.

"Ante up," drawled Wolfwood.

Bullets were tossed into the space between them.

Wolfwood sighed, tipping the bottle back against his lips.

"Ah," he said, "--a libation, to the patron saint of tiny luxuries."

"You said it," Vash agreed, contemplating the hand the priest had dealt him.

A jack, a seven.

"Stand," he said, frowning.

"Conservative," commented the priest.

Wolfwood flipped his down card. It made for a pair of eights. Not enough. He hit himself again. A six. Fuck.

"Twenty-two," he muttered. "Busted."

Vash smiled.

"Never hit a hard seventeen," he said, raking in the pot.

"Whatever," Wolfwood said, but the corner of his mouth smiled. "Ante up."

Vash swallowed a long drink of liquor, relishing the burn in his throat. It seared away sand and dryness in a flash of blissful warmth.

"House could have twenty-one," Wolfwood said, looking at his face card, the ace of diamonds. "Do you want insurance?"

"Would it do me any good if you did?" Vash shrugged. "I doubt it."

"Suit yourself," said Wolfwood, adeptly turning over his second card. A king.

"Hey, Blackjack!" he crowed, grinning.

"Deal," Vash said, shaking his head.

They played out the hands in companionable quiet, speaking only of matters relating to the cards, and Vash felt inexplicably content.

Better yet, he was winning.

"Charmed game," he said.

"Charmed _life_," the priest remarked, wryly, as he prepared to deal again.

The cards fell like a challenge.

Vash's eyes followed their descent, assessing.

"Hit," he said, eyeing the ace and six that lay upturned before him.

Twenty-one.

"Player wins," sighed Wolfwood. "House pays."

"Always hit a soft seventeen," Vash said, happily.

"You and your rules, Tongari."

"It's common sense."

Wolfwood grinned.

"That may be. I call it playing it safe."

"It's obviously working well enough," countered Vash, indicating his small mountain of rounds.

"For now."

"_Now_ is where we _live_, Friend."

Wolfwood met his gaze.

"What I'm saying is, no matter how well you play, the House always comes out ahead."

Vash felt a chill that he knew Wolfwood had not intended his words to evoke when he said them, but there it was, hanging between them, and now his eyes registered that he felt it too.

Vash drew a breath.

"That's fatalist," he said, coolly, reaching for the bottle of whiskey.

"It's a fact." Wolfwood's tone was bloodless.

Vash wondered what the topic actually was. He felt as if he should know. As if they both should know.

But the subject just didn't exist yet.

"I guess there's nothing the player can do then."

"He can quit while he's ahead."

Vash laughed sharply.

He flipped several bullets into the center, raising his bets.

"One should always follow a streak of luck," he said. "According to the odds."

"Luck runs out, Tongari."

"Does it."

"Sometimes…" Wolfwood paused. "Sometimes you need to risk to win. Even if it goes against your philosophy."

The priest looked up, his voice low.

"You need to hit the hard numbers."

Vash stared at him.

"Are you the House, Wolfwood?"

"I'm just a dealer."

Vash nodded, never moving his eyes.

He pushed his entire pile of bullets forward.

"Then deal," he said, deliberately.

Wolfwood shrugged, resorting the deck, which he presented.

Vash cut it in his hand.

He dealt.

Two tens for Vash the Stampede.

Another ace for him.

"Do you want insurance?"

"No insurance."

Vash's eyes were wide and violently green, fixed on Wolfwood with a purpose he could not define.

"Hit me," he said.

"That's suicide," Wolfwood said, startled. "You can't hit twenty."

"That's a risk I'm willing to take."

"It's a stupid risk."

"Risk to win, you said. You wanted me to hit the hard numbers, right Churchman? Well they don't get any harder than that."

His gaze was seething in a way that gave the priest pause.

Wolfwood leaned back, slowly.

"Fine," he said. "A hit it is."

He spun the card down abruptly, the sharpness of the gesture revealing his upset.

And Vash smiled.

"_Hey_!" he said. "Look at that."

Wolfwood could scarcely believe it.

"How did you pull an ace?" he asked thickly.

"Who knows?"

Vash shook his head, grinning. His sudden anger had dissipated like a flock of startled doves at the sight of the salvation card.

"Who cares? I broke the House."

"And I lost," Wolfwood said quietly.

There was a moment of silent horror, then, a sudden intrusive darkness that seemed entirely displaced, for the moment, for the circumstances.

Vash swallowed.

"I don't want to play anymore."

Wolfwood nodded, suddenly reticent.

Outside the sandstorm redoubled, blasting blindly at the walls.


	3. Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

Vash seemed galvanized, compelled into motion.

He quickly swept away the army of cartridges and cards, looking stricken. There was pause, and he slowly looked up.

"Nicholas," he said, quietly.

It was intimate, uncommon, Vash invoking his given name.

"Yes?" Wolfwood answered, with difficulty.

The gunman's hand reached out and touched his shoulder.

He closed his eyes.

Which arm was it? The real arm? Or piecework? He couldn't tell. The gesture was tender and subtle in any case.

"Do you want a drink?" Vash asked, pushing the whiskey toward him.

Wolfwood opened his eyes.

"Yeah," he said, slowly.

He reached for it, and felt Vash's fingers beneath his own. Vash held fast, staying the bottle.

"I need to say something, Wolfwood."

Vash the Stampede, with his bleeding heart and devastating arm.

His voice was almost plaintive.

Wolfwood looked at him, bemused.

"Eh? Why sure," he said. "Whatever you want."

Vash released the bottle.

Wolfwood pulled it to his lips. He drank, and drank deep.

All the while the infamous Vash the Stampede sat, looking slightly morose, hunched forward with his elbows rested on his thighs.

"Well?" The priest said, after a decent interval. "Do I have to haul out the portable confessional?"

The outlaw smiled faintly, eyes forward, watching the swirl of sand against the window glass, milling and striking like an ocean of furious bees.

"They make something like that?"

"If they don't, they should."

Silence, except for the steady fanning brush of storm-flung sand.

"When I touched you, just now. You didn't pull away."

Vash paused.

"And it reminded me," he said, "of how you never do."

Wolfwood dropped his gaze, staring at the worn blanket beneath them. The coppery taste of compassion filled his mouth.

Vash kept his eyes straight.

"Everyone else is afraid," he said bluntly. "I've scratched that shiny surface by looking too long, or too hard… Meryl, of course. Even poor Milly, a little bit.

"Fear never looks back at me from you. And you have no idea--," he trailed off, almost wearily. "You have no idea, that's all. But thank you."

Wolfwood exhaled against the sensation welling upward in his chest.

He snatched a cigarette and lit it, the motion quick and light.

Vash had a beatific smile on his lips, as if he'd confessed after all, and been absolved.

_I ought to charge him_, thought the priest, absently, even as his thoughts began to turn and shift and betray him, falling away beneath his feet like the treacherous sands outside of town.

He drew in fumes, intangible and diaphanous, and found he couldn't hold them. He blew them into the air where they dissolved and left him wanting.

"Vash," he said, the cigarette held between his lips, sullenly trailing smoke.

"Yes?" he answered, in his genial tone, his eyebrows aloft as if he'd been gently but unexpectedly pulled from thoughts in deeper places.

_What was it I wanted to say?_

Something about hits, and face cards. Something about odds and impulses. Something about friends and philosophy.

Or to say nothing at all, except that Vash had laid down his hand, and it was his turn.

Wolfwood's inclination was sudden, beyond all rational thought.

_Everyone has to give a little,_ Vash had said, once, as they walked together in May City. _Necessity is the mother of concession._

_I think you have that wrong, _he'd said. _It doesn't go like that._

But now he wondered vaguely if Vash hadn't been right after all.

Not about the phrase, no, that was sure as hell wrong as wrong ever got-

But what about the concept?

Risk.

"Want a drink?" he asked.

Vash nodded.

If he was surprised when Wolfwood took a sip of whiskey himself instead of handing him the bottle, he didn't betray it.

Vash the Stampede- universally empathetic, understanding to a virtue and a fault, his eyes open and clement. Vash the Stampede, who foresaw every forensic intention like blazing neon in the empty blue sky.

Omniscient oblivion. Anathema.

Wolfwood reached out and took hold of him by the front of his coat, pulling him forward.

Vash just looked at him, artless, unassuming.

Even now, with their faces apart by mere inches, no comprehension lit in the bright-bright, brilliant green of those eyes, as if it foreshadowed nothing to Vash to find them in such intimate proximity.

_If I had a gun, you'd have read me by now, Tongari._

The steady, shallow lightness of his breath. The intensity that infused and informed his stance.

Wolfwood was no longer watching for the light to dawn. His eyes drifted downward, seeking the unaffected curves of Vash's mouth.

His head tilted, lips parting of their own volition, as he caught that mouth against his own, roughly, stealing the slight space between them.

Vash responded instinctively in the wake of his shattered nonchalance-- aware of the warm, firm lips that enveloped his, his mouth easing open beneath their insistence.

He tasted soft brimstone, and the undeniable promise of Wolfwood's intentions. The bite of the whiskey on his tongue.

His tongue.

He felt Wolfwood's fingers relax their grip on his collar, slowly, as he eased back, though he didn't release him completely. The priest's lips were full and dusky, stained by the slow burn of the liquor.

"No," Wolfwood told him, breathlessly. "I'm not afraid of you."

Vash stared, but it was not his usual innocuous, ingenuous look of wonder. It was decidedly more studious, his eyebrows level, the eyes below them open but narrowed in assessment.

Wolfwood knew that expression.

_He looks like that when he's sizing up a trick shot_, he realized, fleetingly, and might have found it funny enough to laugh at, oh, if only he were less distracted.

Vash breathed in.

"I can see that," he said, at last.

"You always were sharp as a knife," Wolfwood managed, barely registering the words as he spoke them. "As sharp as your hair, anyway…"

Yes, that hair. Swept upward from his temples like a flaxen crown of thorns. A forest of tiny javelins pitched into sand from a distance.

Vash's lips were vibrant, flushed from the ardent abuses of his mouth.

He hesitated to say it.

"-_Tongari_."

The gunman actually shuddered.

"What are you doing, Wolfwood?" he said softly. There was still a hardness about his eyes, but it seemed brittle, breached somehow.

Unbidden, perhaps unconscious, his leather-gloved hand crept around the priest's back and upwards, finding his hair, coming to uneasy rest.

Was _that_ ever a happening.

It was the tactility, Wolfwood realized, that he was unprepared for- his physical reaction. Entirely different from willfully, premeditatedly touching Vash was the first reality of Vash, touching him.

The priest bit his lip at the oddity of it all, throwing his head back against the mercy of those tentative fingers.

He remembered the question, dimly.

_Christ wept tacks, Vash,_ he thought. _What does it matter, what I'm doing. We're polarized, we're infinite; we're opposed and the same. We push violently apart only to meet on the other side! We ache for that, don't we, in the other's absence? _

But Vash wanted him to answer, and he deserved that much, so he looked him in the eye, and gave him one, the only one that came to mind.

"I'm compromising myself," he said.

The statement was plain and unadorned.

Vash looked incredulous, yes- there was that wide-eyed wonder, the brows tilted outward, heartbreaking, really- half concern and all hope.

For a moment, Wolfwood doubted him.

Could he truly exist and draw breath- someone so artless, lacking even the smallest mantle of guile to conceal his true nature?

True nature.

Wolfwood swallowed, trying to repress the primal motives of his own. The more Vash stood resistant, or at least indecisive-

But he wasn't really…was he.

The priest became cognizant of the gunman's posture, which had shifted, ever so slightly, betraying his perspective on the issue. His hand, which slid down Wolfwood's back, was not going chastely.

"Has anyone ever told you, _Friend_, that you lack compassion?" Vash said, solemnly, looking at him.

The outlaw's other hand reached across him, taking the cigarette from his waiting fingers and killing it deliberately in the ashtray beside the bed.

Wolfwood wanted to laugh, but he felt transfixed for the moment, unable to react, unable to do anything but wait for the mercilessly slow descent of Vash's mouth, and when it met his, at last, it was a crush, and a clash, and a beautiful wreck-

And there was nothing compassionate about that, now was there-?

But there _was._


	4. Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

Wolfwood found himself leaning forward, forcing Vash down, back onto his elbows, his red coat falling open and spilling across the bedclothes beneath him.

And Vash's arms, stronger than he remembered, pulling him down along with him as he fell.

They'd been here before, in another life, a scant few days ago, grappling on the sand in drunken horseplay.

He'd looked down at Vash the Stampede, and _up_ at Vash the Stampede, he'd _punched_ Vash the Stampede- the times were countless, innumerable. It occurred to him that numbers faded into greater and greater irrelevance with each reckless moment that passed.

Vash pulled his arms free of the red coat savagely, revealing straps and buckles of silver and dark-brown leather, the endless circuit of binding that formed his entire figure from wrist to ankle to neck.

The priest's hands were upon him at once, like baptism, roaming over the lashed-down contours of his body, his eyes darkly luminous in the half-light. Vash breathed in as Wolfwood worshipped the surface of his confinement, distant, as if through water.

He began to pull open the straps, one by one, releasing him.

Vash raised his eyebrows.

"Whatever happened to 'all things in moderation'?"

"Yeah, everything," murmured Wolfwood. "All things."

"I'm lost, Friend. You call this moderate?"

"All things in moderation," the priest reiterated, firmly, his fingers slowly, steadily working down the staggered line of buckles.

With each one Vash felt stabbing arousal, ever mounting, merciless.

"_Especially_ moderation," Wolfwood added, pausing before freeing the last restraint, letting Vash's piecework suit of post-apocalyptic armor fall open to his waist.

The scars.

Wolfwood exhaled softly.

Like indelible hieroglyphs. Somehow he had forgotten- or merely misplaced- their existence.

They branded his skin, marring the smooth surface. They spanned like the lines on a roadmap. They crossed his chest and shoulders in nightmare barbed wire.

Vash looked at him mildly.

"You've seen them," he said. "Remember--"

"I've seen them," Wolfwood said quietly. "That doesn't make them hurt any less."

"They're vestiges," Vash said, smiling. "They don't hurt."

"Yeah they do," he said.

There was an abrupt surge of motion and he found himself on his back, with Vash hovering above.

"Let it go for once, friend."

Vash was looking down at him, soberly, his mouth slightly cloven.

Wolfwood felt his hands descend, unbuttoning his suit-jacket, fingers sliding under the edge of his white shirt, laying it open, exposing him. He felt crucified, and aroused.

Vash was deconstructing him.

"Do you know what to do?" he asked, without thinking.

"Nope," Vash said laconically, and lowered his mouth to Wolfwood's taut and electrified flesh, searing a line downward, downward, as the priest dug his palms into the mattress, respiring in sharp draws.

His belt was quickly finessed open, and Vash would have pushed his advantage further but Wolfwood managed to stay him. He bolted upright, an effortless command to the flat of his quivering stomach, and took the gunman by the back of the neck, pressing their mouths together.

Though there was no sound, he could feel Vash moaning around the invasion of his tongue, overwhelmed, and he kissed him harder, feeling his cock lurch against black broadcloth, demanding to be unfettered.

But no, he would deal with Vash first.

Wildly methodical, Wolfwood reached between them, stripping back the straps that crossed Vash at the thighs, seeking the destruction of the perpetual uniform, and it fell open like a trick, exposing the low ledge of his loins, less scarred, but no less arresting.

Vash was hard, his cock upthrust, the head hot and smooth as sheared velvet to the faintest brush of his hand.

He grasped it, and Vash blanched sensuously, his shoulders buckling back, fingers reaching out to grip the priest's shoulder.

"Christ," Wolfwood muttered, overwrought.

Had he dreamed of touching Vash the Stampede? Had he really? If pressed, he would have to say yes. But those waking dreams were amorphous and transient, nothing like what lay before him.

Dreams could not approximate the reality.

Reality was an odd, unfixed, malleable thing. It twisted like candy. One moment it was the cold, hard kiss of a gun against your temple, and in the next, the warm, unexpected breath of carnal life against your lips, consuming you entirely.

Or Vash the Stampede's hand at your waist, insistent, this time-

Wolfwood breathed out as the material peeled back from him, parted and gave way, and there was his cock, angled upward, the soft skin pulled tight over its broad and shuddering hunger.

Vash was silent, but decidedly unshy.

Wolfwood found his mouth dry as he looked at him- lips sullenly parted, eyes half-lidded, eyebrows arched into ardent gull wings.

"Tongari," the priest whispered. "Come here."

Vash moved toward him, and Wolfwood, impatient, caught him by his hips.

Wolfwood's hands were coarse, callused from sand, from weather, from dispersing mercy-

…and they _could_ disperse mercy, Vash thought, shivering, seismic.

Even now it was diffusing over his flesh, emanating outward, radiant, from the roughened tips of Wolfwood's fingers.

He actually felt weak, for a transient instant, as the priest tightened his arms, crushing their bodies together. The pulse of blood in Wolfwood's loins was almost palpable to him, and he could hear the revolutions of his breath surging and receding, echoing like surf in his ears.

There was nothing quite like it in all of his memories.

It was a hung moment, out of time, and even years later he would be able to recall it so starkly that it couldn't be anything but permanent, scored into his consciousness with the heat of both suns.

With his hips flush against Wolfwood's, Vash was acutely aware of the true extent of the other man's desire, pressed between the warm walls of their bodies.

Emboldened, ardent, Vash met his gaze.

He saw them as they always were; infinite bookends, complementary, indispensable. And in the shifting weather of the priest's slate colored eyes, he saw something more.

"You want something."

"Just you."

"I think you have me," Vash managed.

"I will."

And then he was dipping unspeakably low, his mouth tracing unknown patterns past the warm, flat expanse of Vash's stomach, over the vaulted bones of his hip, across the delta of Vash's loins-

It was more of a shock than gunfire, that first descent.

Ripping, like a rocket, through him- but pleasurable, undeniable.

Wolfwood's mouth slipped over his cock like dark honey, devouring his secrets, finding his triggers. Tripping each switch.

Vash threw his head back, hands coming to rest on the priest, twining in the jagged blackness of his hair.

Taunting his flesh, Wolfwood consumed him with a reverence that suggested there might be devotion in his mercenary soul after all…

_In the beginning, there was Knives, and it was good_.

But it wasn't, not entirely, for though it always moved him, his brother's every touch was tempered by cruelty.

_And he was driven from the Garden._

Yes, out into the unforgiving, all-encompassing embrace of granular silica. It was right, and horrible, and he froze, and burned and died every night. He was free, but alone, left to stir the embers of his memories.

_And he was glad._

Yet what was this? In the periphery, this man- his head bowed, as if he prayed, but he did not- he languished, there, hands in the sand, cross at his back.

_And Yo, he drawled, staggering, ascending: I'm the word and the way_. _I am mercy made._

And what particular mercy was this?

_This is my body_.

Blasphemous, beautiful, utter, complete.

_Partake of my body._

Knives may well have been an angel. Avenging, one wing eternally dipped low in blood. The terrible might.

Vash was no angel. He had broken his own wings, defiant.

And Wolfwood was no priest.

Bless him.

_And he loved him, best of all the creatures in the earth, sea and sky_.

Vash shuddered at the sight of Nicholas on his knees before him in such indecent genuflection- his dark head bent, hair rumpled and glossy in the luster of the lantern light.

With every draw and strike of his mouth, the intricate muscles of his back jumped as if they were alive, and Vash realized it was surging, pushing him over the edge, and he didn't exactly want that, not yet, no-

"Nick," he whispered, "Hold off."

Wolfwood stopped immediately, pulling back, releasing his cock and making him blench at the sensation.

His reaction time, as usual, was flawless.

_Cover me!_

Flawless. Of course it was. Wasn't it always?

Wasn't _he_ always?

_Shoot! Don't shoot! _

Responsive to his every need.

Softly chasing his breath, Vash looked at Wolfwood, who had risen upright on his knees to mirror him.

His eyes were turbulent, unfathomable. His hair was disheveled, storm-tossed by the ecstatic clutch of Vash's hands. His mouth was beautiful in its set, animated ever so slightly by the soft and ragged ellipses of his breath.

And his body-

Vash had not studied him, not strictly, in the hectic moments before. Now he took the chance offered by this lull, this break in their strange and vigorous passion, to really see the essence of Wolfwood, as a man, autonomous from the sleek and covert armor of his clothes.

Wolfwood was lean, like he was, yet somehow more ruthless in his build- a plane, a curve here or there that made him more substantial to the eye. His skin was tawny like deep sand, paler below the taut, low edges of his waist, where the sun wasn't privileged enough to venture, but still olive in tone.

A bizarre surge of rapture struck him, gazing at the diamond-like cut of Wolfwood's loins. A surge of living blood in his own.

It was beyond all comprehension, all cohesion. It lingered elusively in the realm of things for which there were no words.

Impulsively, Vash flexed his fingers outward, needing to touch him.

"Where's the naïve routine, Vash the Stampede?"

The careless composure of Wolfwood's voice was betrayed by his gaze, which fairly glowed- feverish, hedonic.

"Can't really pull that with you, now can I?" Vash said, steadily.

Wolfwood wanted him; he could see that much without trying. Perhaps he had always wanted him, and the urge had been obscured by the intricate complexities of the many _ships-_- friendship and hardship and marksmanship--

"You've been known to try."

Vash shook his head, firm with that odd resolve that surfaced every once in awhile, formidable as granite.

"We're beyond pulling punches, friend. We both know what happens next."

Vash's fingers- synthetic but sympathetic, tracing the sharp lines of his hipbone, the taut strength of the hollow where his leg intersected his body. Touching him brazenly, stroking the warm bronze of his skin.

Wolfwood closed his eyes, as a teacup tremor went through him.

"Not necessarily."

Vash put his hand on Wolfwood's cock, fingers circling around it for emphasis.

"Yes, it is. Fairly, really, very, extremely necessary."

"What are you doing?"

"What a stupid question," Vash said, artificially cheerful.

Wolfwood swore lightly under his breath.

He was so very close, Vash the Stampede, and his scent of lust and gunpowder.

"You ought to be careful," Wolfwood said quietly, reaching out for him once more, slowly pulling him closer.

"I'm _always_ careful," Vash said, meeting his eyes. "You know that…"

"You don't even know what you're asking for."

"You really should know better," Vash answered, gravely abrupt. "You seem to think I grew up in a snow-globe wearing a tiara."

"Sometimes you act like it."

"You know better, Wolfwood."

There was no insolence in his tone.

Wolfwood's fingers seized, holding him, leaving marks.

The priest moved with obscene grace, swift and sure in his movements, telegraphing his intentions as he grasped Vash by the shoulders and pushed him ruthlessly down onto the bed.

"Ask, and ye shall _receive_," he murmured, his voice soft with promise, as if it were both an invocation and a warning.

"I _want_ to receive, Nick," Vash said, calmly.


End file.
